Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1)

by Grist, Michael John

  "Fuck," says Ray, with a sigh. "So what you're telling us is, we haven't got a bloody clue what the map means."

  I stifle a snort.

  "Not yet," says So. "Not until we see some of its internal architecture. But when you do, you're going to let me know, and I'll get to work on cracking a route. I've already got three ways of solving the two-dimensional version. They may even hold up for the three-dimensional one."

  She slings another image, one with a flashing red slowly creeping around the outer ring, which I recognize as us. So handsome, I wonder idly. Such a fetching shade of red.

  "What was that, Me?" Doe asks.

  I catch myself mumbling, and snap out of it. This place is making me giddy. "Nothing," I say. "Go on."

  Three colored routes appear across the flat circular map. "It depends on what the shapes are- if they're solid or hollow, if they're doorways or what. There's a way through in any case."

  "My head is spinning," says Ray. "Does it matter what axis of rotation?"

  I laugh this time.

  "That's more like it Me," he says. "Stop your crazy muttering."

  That only makes me laugh more. "We're going to be OK," I say, and in that moment I really mean it.

  After that we mostly fall silent. Even Far stops larking around, and falls into a steady march at Ray's side. Every now and then I see Ray tapping Far on his head and face, enjoying some private blood-mic conversation and musical composition.

  We walk, and I watch the handsome red blip of us circle around, toward the far end of the Solid Core.

  There is a ladder.

  We all stop and stare, dumbfounded. It rises up out of the grass of a spartan clearing, and continues all the way directly up to the glossy black ceiling overhead. It looks to be made of pine-colored wood, and is impossibly long.

  "That's very convenient," says Ray.

  "It's a trap," says Doe.

  I look around, but see no sign of any soldiers, nothing of any sort. "It may be a trap," I say, "but it's where we want to go anyway."

  I shine my whitelights at the ladder terminus, but the pool of inky blackness around it is impenetrable. There is a hint that the ladder continues inward, though.

  "I'll go first," says Ray, and looks to me.

  I shake my head. "No. I want you at my back, then Far, and Doe brings up the rear to rig the radio and cable. Is everybody clear?"

  Ray nods. I look at Far, who has gone a little pale.

  "Put on your HUD," I tell him.

  I don't have the soft touch that Ray does, but this is not about being soft. The boy's had his time for fun, we all have, and now we're down to business. I pull out my broken-off bayonet, carefully wrapped with duct-tape for a handle, and wedge it in an easily accessible space in my thigh armor, then start across the clearing to the ladder.

  The rungs up close look much like the trees and the leaves, printed with a pattern that repeats. They climb up towering above me, and at my feet sink into the grass. I kick at the dirt there, see the ladder-bars descending.

  "Here goes nothing," I say, lay my hands to the rungs, and start the ascent.

  Steadily I climb. Looking up I can still see nothing inside the inner sphere. Looking down Ray, Doe, and Far start to look more like little models, stranded in a clump on that fake grass. The height makes me giddy in a way the corroded outer metal didn't, and I wonder that it's the perspective, so stop looking back.

  I look at the rungs, and my hands.

  "Good luck," comes Ray's voice from below.

  The blind-dark black is just above me, roaring with a silence I can't understand. It feels to be drawing me up, as though my ascent is unstoppable, inexorable. I cannot fight it, and steadily one hand pushes through the darkness, then the other, and I climb up into-

  GODSHIP G

  It takes two hours before the first of the godships comes into sight. They are a dirty brown smudge on the clay-gray horizon, rusted hulls split like long-rotten bananas, barely emergent over the waves.

  I try to count them, but the bucking of the speedboat against the rough water prevents me. A fleet, or a school. I see a half hull here, a tilted glimpse of white-above decks there, a bulbous under-nose jutting proudly up like an erection out of a corpse midden.

  I shake my head to clear the image, and am greeted by the drilling pain of my Arcloberry hangover. A thousand brain-cells dead with every sip. My shoulder stings in the salt wind where Zachery's bullet grazed it, though the cut has long dried over. My stomach throbs where it met his bat.

  I stopped once after leaving the abandoned skulk, well out of range to be seen. I wrapped a sock round the graze in my upper-arm, a ragged tear in the outer skin only, then dug through the speedboat's boarding and guts to find its GPS transponder, a chunk of black plastic with a red and yellow lead trailing from it. Like the node, I dropped it into the water. Then I opened up the folder from Mr. Ruins and shook it out to the godship page.

  CATHEDRAL SHIP GRAVEYARD

  ARCTIC SEA

  Beneath the title there was a hand-sketched map of the Arctic circle with all its ice denuded, so familiar from my days in the skirmishes, and beneath that some coordinates.

  82.154458, 53.430175

  I keyed it into the speedboat's navigation, set for the bearing it gave, then leaned into the wind and rode it out.

  Now my body drips and shivers like a liquid distillery. I feel each ounce of nutrition from my last meal of seaweed wring through me, along with all the sullen alcohol, slowly sweating out through my pores. Every movement of my head brings a silver flash of brief drunkenness, pockets hiding like the Lag and waiting to leap up on me.

  Of course I remember it all, now. Mei-An, Napoleon, Mr. Ruins with his big shark teeth and everything he said, of watching me and womb-machines, bringing me to this.

  I am exhausted. I need to eat, and to rest.

  The godships draw closer, rising up like arcing brown cliffs, spotted with the sheen of intact glass reflecting the rain-sun at my back. I pick out hulls with their backs broken over invisible undercurrent rocks, completely upturned and resting like drooping brown slugs. I pick out forecastles skewed at wild angles like dirty wind-blown icicles. I pick out a gossamer network of cables, threads and walkways strung between them, like spider-webs shining with winter dew.

  The fuel gauge on the speedboat blips. The dial has sunk down below the halfway mark, and I wonder if it might be enough to return. I don't care too much about it then, though. I want food, and a place to rest.

  I choke the boat down in the water just off the biggest remaining godship, so close I can smell the iron-stink of its rust, hear the wind whistling through its cracks and shot-through portholes. It is completely upturned in the water, and stands now like a cragged brown wall. The rear end has sheared away, perhaps torn by the tsunami that fated it, or one that followed, weighted down by its engine block. One of the propellers though remains, somehow wedged like a sparkling star in the rocks nearby, its dark paint scoured clean by decades of corrosive saltwater.

  I can read the ship's name, stenciled in paint almost too faint to make out, upside down toward the underside's bulbous gannet nose.

  SAINT AQUINAS OF YLEP

  From the proto-Rusk federation. I look about at the other godships scattered here like beached whales on the under-sea crags, half of them obscured now by the Ylep's massive wall-hull. Surely there are representatives of all the major factions and coalitions here, the Afri-Jarvanese, the Gaullic Federation, Sino-Anglica, the draggled remnants of the Texarchy.

  All gathered up by one fell wave, as they gathered for the pole, and dumped here.

  I look up to the signs of this ship's most recent habitation: a line of slipshod timber walkway bolted into the great ship's keel-edge, leading along to a few tiny huts beaten out of ship's tin, within one the glimmer of reflected light.

  I recognize the pattern of a Fresnel lens, signifying a lighthouse. We always ported them through the skirmishes and dropped them in four-man
pay-loads on any outcropping we came across, before submersing again. Tube light from the fresnels was unjammable, and focused correctly could shoot over 50 nautical miles, far enough to get a signal back to our base-ships moored at the skirmish line.

  Mortars would be sent, and the Fresnel crew would only need to clear the facility into copper-hulled shellboats to be safe.

  There is no sign of any life, now. Perhaps the last wave 15 years gone cleared them all out. The walkway seems to sag, and the haulage rope hanging down the Ylep's side no longer reaches to water.

  "Hello!" I call out.

  No answer comes, only the lonely echo of my own voice. I slide the gun into the back-band of my pants, and lean in to guide the speedboat slowly forward, through the maze of rocky crags, toward the Ylep's broken cross-section. A new thrust of adrenaline makes me wakeful and ready.

  Steadily I round the wall-edge of the great ship's side, and look up at the slice cut through its middle, where the rear-engine half was torn away. The whole ship here is warped and twisted, several decks down low have been crushed completely, others popped too wide for their alignments, all at a 20 or 30 degree angle.

  It is like looking at some strange doll house with the front façade peeled back. I see into the ship from an angle never intended, with all its scaffolding supports laid bare, the central block of elevator shafts with their cars hanging like cans of beans on strings, corridors that are only pop-holes, leading inward to darkness, signs of a large and grand hall, the chandelier broken on the floor that was once the roof.

  I imagine people rustling up and down the rigging strung over the decks, within the ship's last incarnation. There must have been hundreds of people here then, perhaps survivors of the godship holocaust, or survivors of some other, a far-flung diaspora come to make a place for themselves.

  The thought makes me maudlin, and I feel it canceling out the adrenaline. What else is Calico but a larger version of the godships, and what are the skulks but the second layer of fungal life that sprang up here, only to be washed away? It would only take a larger wave to turn Calico into this too.

  There are lines and metal-paved rope-bridges leading out to the other wrecks, a forest of rigging in the air, but no people. They are all dead or gone, but I feel them thick in the air like ghosts, moving about me. Perhaps it is the hangover, but I swear the weight of them is pressing upon me, drawing me in, pushing me out.

  This place is not only one ruin, but two: the ruin and the ruin of the ruin.

  Looking back to the Ylep's cross-section, I spot panels of metal riveted in unexpected places, more signs of the habitation, blocking off the narrowest corridors and halls. I imagine a whole section within, water-proofed and secure.

  I nuzzle the speedboat forward, down a metal-hulled section of rock beaten back like a canal, and into a berth at the base of the great ship. Gloom overtakes me, as I enter the makeshift garage, and pull the power down.

  There are other small craft here, two jet-skis and a tug barge, resting on a long metal bulkhead above the water. There are strands of graffiti on the walls, written in the jagged proto-Rusk alphabet that my old injects translate faithfully for me.

  MEN'S HEAD WOMEN'S HEAD

  I smile at that, I don't know why. It's the giddiness or the weight, perhaps. Everybody needs to pee.

  I slip Mr. Ruins' folder into my shirt again and climb out of the speedboat. I wonder briefly if he is here, but this concern is trumped by the hunger riling in my belly like the Lag. If there is no food here, then I cannot stay. I'll have to roar back for the city-strip, to Tenbridge Wulls or Saunderston, and hope I'll be able to cross the tsunami wall before one of the Don's agents catches me.

  That's a concern for a later time, though. For now, food.

  The shady Ylep's harbor is rock-solid underfoot. I scan the walls for more graffiti, and see a sprayed red sign indicating BRIDGE. It leads into darkness behind a wall that must be a stairwell, and I take it.

  A corridor leads off into deep darkness, fenced-off at waist-height by two long planks of wood, presumably stripped off a floor somewhere. I assume from this that these people, whoever they were, had children.

  To my left is a stairwell, rising upward. The space is light and clear, due to regular windows punched through the inner wall to the cross-section. The stairs rise overhead, connecting the floor-ceiling to the floor-ceiling below. They also rise up beside me, what was once the stair's underside. A railing pole has been added, and I start upward.

  My feet clang hard on the metal stairs no matter how softly I tread. This must've been a crew access chute, once leading down to crew quarters in the hull, ballast tanks, perhaps off-shoots of the old engine room, and any storage holds. Now as I climb it only gets lighter, and the irregular windows punched in the walls let in sighing, refreshing waves of fresh sea-air.

  More graffiti, as I rise. Signs for the BRIDGE continue to point me upward, while others appear alongside them.

  HABITATION

  CANTEEN

  NETTING

  CHAPEL

  On the first HABITATION deck landing, three flights of stairs up, I stop and listen for a time. Above the breath of the wind, the drip of long-percolated water through the grand ship's filtration decks, the creak of distant doors swaying on their hinges, I think I hear voices.

  They are like a whisper, very far off but all around me at the same time. I move carefully toward the door out of the stairwell. I climb the short ad hoc metal steps that lift me from the old ceiling to level with the old door's top lintel, then draw it open carefully.

  There is a long hallway before me, the roof lined with red carpet brocaded with gold, the walls lined with white picture-rails and red wallpaper and paintings of ships at sea, interspersed with dark wood doors hanging from the ceiling, every one marked with upside-down numbers at hip-level . The floor is gray metal leading down another makeshift row of steps, lined with gray-painted pipes and the nubs of old light fixtures.

  A wave of something rises and hits me then, some indistinct emotion I barely recognize but am powerless to repel. A kind of nostalgia for some past I never knew, for this corridor through what was once surely crew quarters deep in the ship's belly, with its little touches to make it homely and pleasant, despite the fact that this far below the waterline they would have no view out to ocean, would only see the tin-walled room of their metal-can life.

  The feeling rises and the voices rise with it, swelling up over me so close I can catch fragments of their conversation on the air, talk about how the dinner service went and that sweet old couple at the waltz for God, whether Stacy was fucking Reg or Clancy, the sound of voices rising in ecstasy, then panic, screams, and the grinding as the great ship was lofted in the air and flipped like God's own burger on God's own grill.

  I shudder and slump against the corridor wall, nearly fall down the metal steps to the old ceiling as my legs turn to jelly. Breathing hard against the faded red wall-paper, I concentrate on not dry-heaving what little food I have left in my stomach, on getting my legs to be solid again.

  After a while, I stand up. The voices are gone, as is the feeling, all except a distant tickle in the back of my mind. I recognize it like the empty frame of a memory lost to the Lag, though it's different. This is more like the weight of the memory with the frame missing, something I've never felt before.

  I rub my eyes, and start along the corridor. The hunger is ravenous now, driving me on faster. If there are people here, so be it. I throw open the first room, and look in on a room filled with possessions, abandoned. There is a large rectangle window cut through the outer hull, filled with badly-fitting cracked glass wedged around with some kind of gray grouting, through which I can see the gray sky.

  A bed covered in tangled sheets, clothes on the floor, a wooden dresser tipped on its side, assorted toys everywhere.

  They never meant to leave, I realize. They had no time.

  I think back to the last tsunami warning, when half of the neon-skulks of pr
oto-Calico were abandoned and empty, when I walked into the old graysmithy and simply claimed it for my own.

  These people fled too, with no time to gather their possessions, everything that once mattered to them. They fled, and someone else came to take their place.

  But there is no food.

  I back out of the room and climb the steps back through the door, then climb up the bright and airy stairwell until I find the floor for CANTEEN.

  Through the door, no longer stopping to wait to hear voices, I find a large hall spotted all down its edge with bright gulches torn from the walls, covered over with fraying white sheets to keep out the wind. Light gloams through, illuminating long red benches and a cascade of tangled chairs. Overhead there is a long metal bar, and through the gloom I can pick out the shapes of kitchen equipment still clinging to their foundations in the ceiling.

  Beneath that, there is a wall full of cabinets, some of them once-glass fronted and now metal-walled, some of them of wood cobbled together from broken parts, some authentic furniture surely scavenged from the wreck.

  I kick a path through tumbled chairs toward them, throw the first one open, and find it is stocked full of cans of pineapple slices. An unstoppable smile cracks my face, and I open the next, and the next. Meatballs, dry pasta, cans of stored vegetables, all kinds. There must be the ship's entire stock of dried goods arrayed along this wall, enough to feed thousands in their ark until the floods dispelled and their god showed them the way forward.

  I snatch up a can of pineapples, then scour the floor for a tool to open it with. I have to detour into the darkness of the under-kitchen, then I come upon five great hampers filled with cutlery, long-necked spoons, and can-openers.

  Standing in the white light cast through one of the plastic sheets, lifeboat covers, I come to realize, I snap a lid back on one of the pineapples and breathe in the intoxicating perfume of Carib sugar. There is no rot or befoulment. I spoon out the first ring of pineapple with a fork and shovel it down my mouth.

  Heaven. For a time, my hangover disappears completely.